Vietnam POWs came home heroes, but twenty years earlier their predecessors returned from Korea to shame and suspicion. In the Korean War (1950-1953) American prisoners were used in propaganda twice, first during the conflict, then at home. While in Chinese custody in North Korea, they were pressured to praise their treatment and criticize the war. When they came back, the Department of the Army and cooperative pundits said too many were weaklings who did not resist communist indoctrination or "brainwashing." Ex-prisoners were featured in a publicity campaign scolding the nation to raise tougher sons for the Cold War. This propaganda was based on feverish exaggerations that ignored the convoluted circumstances POWs were put in, which decisions in Washington helped create. POWs became pivotal to the Korean War after peace talks began in summer 1951. Since fighting had stalemated, both sides raced to win propaganda victories. The Chinese publicized American airmen who confessed to alleged germ warfare atrocities. American commanders worked to discredit communism by encouraging thousands of North Korean and Chinese prisoners to defect. Clandestine agents and a fraternity of anticommunist prisoners launched a violent campaign to inflate the number of POWs refusing repatriation after the war. Armistice negotiations floundered while China and North Korea demanded their soldiers back. United States delegates held out for what they called "voluntary repatriation," but in reality, thousands of prisoners were terrorized into renouncing their right of return. American POWs remained captive for eighteen more months of fighting over the terms of a compromised prisoner exchange. In the United States, details of the voluntary repatriation policy were suppressed. Name, Rank, and Serial Number explains how this provides new insight into why Korea became "the forgotten war."
Show moreVietnam POWs came home heroes, but twenty years earlier their predecessors returned from Korea to shame and suspicion. In the Korean War (1950-1953) American prisoners were used in propaganda twice, first during the conflict, then at home. While in Chinese custody in North Korea, they were pressured to praise their treatment and criticize the war. When they came back, the Department of the Army and cooperative pundits said too many were weaklings who did not resist communist indoctrination or "brainwashing." Ex-prisoners were featured in a publicity campaign scolding the nation to raise tougher sons for the Cold War. This propaganda was based on feverish exaggerations that ignored the convoluted circumstances POWs were put in, which decisions in Washington helped create. POWs became pivotal to the Korean War after peace talks began in summer 1951. Since fighting had stalemated, both sides raced to win propaganda victories. The Chinese publicized American airmen who confessed to alleged germ warfare atrocities. American commanders worked to discredit communism by encouraging thousands of North Korean and Chinese prisoners to defect. Clandestine agents and a fraternity of anticommunist prisoners launched a violent campaign to inflate the number of POWs refusing repatriation after the war. Armistice negotiations floundered while China and North Korea demanded their soldiers back. United States delegates held out for what they called "voluntary repatriation," but in reality, thousands of prisoners were terrorized into renouncing their right of return. American POWs remained captive for eighteen more months of fighting over the terms of a compromised prisoner exchange. In the United States, details of the voluntary repatriation policy were suppressed. Name, Rank, and Serial Number explains how this provides new insight into why Korea became "the forgotten war."
Show moreAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Over There
1. Limited War Sets the Stage for the POW Odyssey
2. The Middle Passage: Life-Changing Horrors in the First Year of
Captivity
3. Andersonville East: Communist Prisoners are Pressured to
Defect
4. Welcome, Fellow Peasant: The Chinese Seek Converts
5. POWL: Prisoners of Limited War Languish as Propaganda Becomes a
Substitute for Victory
6. The Failure of Chinese Indoctrination
7. The United Nations Command Withholds POWs
Part II: Over Here
8. Home to Cheers and Jeers
9. The Brainwashing Dilemma: Atrocity Reports Undermine
Punishment
10. Prosecutions Rile the Nation
11. Target Mom: Disciplining "Misplaced Sympathy"
12. Missing Action: Hollywood Films Try and Fail to Fix
Captivity
13. The Hidden Reason for Forgetting Korea
Conclusion: Two Wars, the Visible and the Cloaked
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Charles S. Young is Associate Professor of History, Southern Arkansas University.
"Young's book serves up a diplomatic-history-meets-pow saga that
transforms the story of both American and communist prisoners of
war into a cautionary tale of the deliberate politicization of war
and its unintended consequences....[I]mmeasurably valuable to every
citizen of the republic."--Journal of American History
"Charles Young has written a sensitive, riveting, balanced,
well-researched, and highly readable book that has a surprising
contemporary relevance, given the Bush administration's torture of
POWs. Young examines how all sides dealt with POWs in Korea,
especially the treatment of POWs by the US and South Korea
(something usually overlooked in such accounts), and knocks down
any number of myths about 'brainwashing.' This is a well-informed,
critical and truly
important addition to a literature that is surprisingly small, but
intensely pertinent."--Bruce Cumings, author of The Korean War: A
History
"Charles Young adroitly rescues his subjects from decades of
obscurity and puts prisoners of war where they belong: at the
center of the Korean War story. Based on extensive archival
research and fresh oral history interviews, Name, Rank, and Serial
Number is accessible, empathetic, and thoroughly
persuasive."--Susan L. Carruthers, author of Cold War Captives:
Imprisonment, Escape and Brainwashing
"This is an original and valuable addition to both the political
and the cultural history of the Korean War. Charles Young
convincingly shows that Washington's manipulation of the POW issue
added two years to the war and thus doubled the number of U.S.
casualties. He then gives us a nuanced vision of how this
manipulation led to a destructive reimagining of the POWs in
American culture."--H. Bruce Franklin, author of M.I.A. or
Mythmaking in America
"This well-written, provocative book is especially valuable for its
analysis of the treatment of returning prisoners-of-war in the
context of U.S. culture during the 1950s."--William Stueck, author
of Rethinking the Korean War
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